Serena Davies reviews the first part of Iran and the West, BBC2's documentary
series on Iran and its relationship with the Western world.

You could hardly accuse BBC2 of flunking its public service remit with Iran and the West. There’s no dry ice or disco lights in this channel’s Saturday night line-up. After yet another lesson on Darwin (a repeat of Sir David Attenborough’s recent pondering on the Great Man) viewers could settle down to a painstakingly detailed breakdown of historical events that happened 30 years ago as the first episode of a new four-part documentary series took us, stage by stage, through the Iranian revolution.

Iran and the West was made by Brook Lapping, the Rolls-Royce of political documentary makers. The company’s past achievements include Death of Yugoslavia and Israel and the Arabs, landmark analyses of their respective topics; past interviewees include Bill Clinton, Slobodan Milosevic and Yasser Arafat. Iran and the West should prove no exception. Saturday’s opener included contributions from everyone from Jimmy Carter to Queen Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran’s wife. They’d been so thorough I half expected them to have disinterred Khomeini for the purpose of a few quotes.

The documentary required, throughout, the kind of concentration very rarely demanded of us by television programmes these days. There were no sensationalist repetitions of the bloodiest moments of conflict; there were no patronising historical reconstructions with bad British actors speaking in funny accents. There was simply narrative, as impartial as seemed possible, very tightly told. It was told partly through fascinating archive footage from the time, and partly through the words of the film’s interviewees. Interviewees that included a former head of state, but also the figures whose part in history had less to do with their status than their being in the right place at the right time.

We thus heard from German reporter Peter Scholl-Latour, who was handed a sheaf of documents by an assistant to the Ayatollah Khomeini during Khomeini’s flight back to Iran from exile in France after he had heard that the Shah of Iran, in fear of the mounting unrest, had left the country – effectively sanctioning his own deposition. Khomeini took journalists with him on the flight for protection – he feared otherwise his plane would be shot down. The sheaf of documents Scholl-Latour was given (there was even footage of the handover) contained Khomeini’s draft constitution for a new Islamic republic. This was material too dangerous to be found on Khomeini himself should he find himself in enemy hands when he reached Tehran, thus it was entrusted to a foreigner. Scholl-Latour wasn’t told what the papers were for fear of frightening him.

Khomeini, as it turned out, needn’t have worried about his reception in Iran. The massed crowds celebrating his arrival were so great the windows of the Ayatollah’s cars were entirely blacked out by thronging bodies. We know because Brook Lapping found his driver.

Also interviewed in the programme was the leader of the student protestors, Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, who occupied the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979, soon after Khomeini had come to power. They took 52 of its occupants hostage, so poisoning relations between the West and the Islamic state from that point on. Asgharzadeh said that he planned the protest with three other students, although he had also asked a fifth to be involved, who had declined. The fifth was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who would have to wait another 25 years to take his own place in history, as the current president of Iran.

It’s little details like these that gave the story human colour and alleviated the initial dryness and sheer complexity of the first 20 minutes or so of the film’s storytelling. After that the fascination of the events themselves took over – which, told by the people who had made them happen, became as gripping as a Hollywood thriller.

Most compelling of all was the tale of the hostage taking and America’s efforts, both military and diplomatic, to get them back, with Jimmy Carter relating the bulk of the tale here. The hostages’ 15-month incarceration destroyed Carter’s presidency. He still hoped, in his remaining couple of months after Reagan had been elected, to secure their release. They were indeed all sitting in an aeroplane on Tehran airport’s runway while Reagan was being inaugurated. But not until five minutes after Carter was no longer president was he told they were free. Iran had permanently humiliated a US leader. An action that, as the narration pointed out, was part of a “pattern of intransigence that continues to this day – and still bamboozles the West.”